Excerpt from the Poem, The Amphibian

By Geet Chaturvedi, Translated from the Hindi by Anita Gopalan

I Walked Along the Rutted Lanes Between Fields

(from The Amphibian)

I do not know who was singing

Amid beats, strains, and melodies, I was conscious of unrhythmic footfalls

The way Kafka was wary of feet beneath the land of Prague

And the eerie sounds they made tripping over stagnant silences.

I walked in silence along the rutted lanes between fields.

The sound of singing echoed from the grasses of a distant past.

Wasn’t this sensation comforting enough, that my past had a song? And

To realize it

While walking in silence along the rutted lanes between fields one day.

It does not matter who was singing—What matters

That there had been a voice

And a song.

About the author:

Geet Chaturvedi is a Hindi poet, essayist, and novelist. He has authored two collections of novellas, three poetry collections, and two books of nonfiction. His poems have been translated into twenty-two languages. He is the recipient of the Syed Haidar Raza Fellowship for fiction writing. He was awarded the Bharat Bhushan Agrawal Award for poetry, Krishna Pratap Award, Shailesh Matiyani Award, and Krishna Baldev Vaid award for fiction. He was named among the Ten Best Writers of India by the English-language daily, The Indian Express. He has recently won the 2021 Vatayan Literary Award given by the Vatayan-UK organization for his contribution to Hindi literature. He lives in Bhopal.

Anita Gopalan is the recipient of a fellowship in English literature from the Indian Ministry of Culture and a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. She is the translator of Geet Chaturvedi’s book of poems, The Memory of Now (Anomalous Press, 2019). She has been published in AGNI, PEN America, Poetry International, Sycamore Review, World Literature Today, Words without Borders, Asymptote, Chicago Review, The Offing, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. She also works as a stock trader.